Deeply German location names like Johann-Sebastian-Bach-Straße and Ausspannplatz will soon be redubbed in Germany after leaders of the decolonization movement such as Chief Kuaima Riruako, the founding father of the Herero people, and Augistinho Neto, first President of Angola.

Community activists in Berlin’s Afrikansche Viertel (“African District”) have been demanding such changes for decades; however, these decisions didn’t come from the city district of Wedding in which the Afrikansche Viertel lies.These moves against the legacy of colonialism were decided nearly 5,000 miles away by the city council of Windhoek — the former colonial capital of German Southwest Africa, also known as today’s Namibia.

Namibia

In Berlin, the fight against the remnants of Germany’s colonial period is not going as well.Every visitor to the city confronts the country’s horrific past through its monuments: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe evokes the millions murdered by the Nazi regime just as the remains of the Berlin Wall remind tourists of East Germany’s cruel Stasi, which, at its peak, employed a network of nearly 200,000 spies against its own people.In stark contrast, Berlin’s only monument to those slaughtered by its colonial officers is the small, nondescript (and often vandalized) “Herero Stone” tucked away in Columbiadamm Cemetery.Many of Germany’s most atrocious colonizers, however, remain glorified in street and place names in the Afrikanisches Viertel.

The irony of a neighborhood seemingly dedicated to Africans that memorializes colonizers who massacred thousands can only be explained by the area’s perverse history.Prior to the First World War, German merchant Carl Hagenbeck earned his fortune by becoming one of the world’s largest traders in wild animals, second only to American circus master P.T. Barnum.His Tierpark Hagenbeck in Hamburg — the first modern zoo with enclosures instead of cages — was such a huge attraction that he sought to duplicate his success by creating the world’s first “human zoo” that would display the people of Germany’s overseas colonies like animals.Hagenbeck imported 103 Herero people from Namibia’s biggest ethnic group for his “Colonial Exposition” and laid out a street grid honoring Germany’s most (in)famous colonizers, but WWI promptly forced him to shelve his plans, and the quarter quickly filled with the dense six-story apartment blocks typical of Berlin.

Perhaps African migrants saw the Afrikanisches Viertel’s name as a self-fulfilling prophecy, or maybe they were simply enticed by this corner of Wedding’s reputation as an affordable working class neighborhood.Either way, the population of African immigrants and Germans of African heritage in this part of the city has grown to over 23,500, leading to ever-louder calls for the colonialist names to go.Berlin Postkolonial — the largest activist group calling for change — has focused its efforts on removing the names of Germany’s three worst colonizers: Carl Peters, leader of Deutsch Ostafrika (Tanzania); Gustav Nachtigal, Commissioner for Deutsch Westafrika (Cameroon & Togo); and Adolf Lüderitz, founder of Deutsch Südwestafrika (Namibia).

Carl Peters, a vocal proponent of Social Darwinism, viewed the indigenous people of modern Tanzania with such disdain, and treated them with such arbitrary cruelty, that his two-year rule of the colony twice provoked popular rebellions against him.After one of his many concubines slept with another man, Peters hanged them both and massacred each of their home villages, thus triggering the investigations by the Imperial Colonial Office that would lead to his downfall.Twenty years after his death in 1941, the Nazis lauded his reputation for racist atrocities by posthumously restoring his official title as Imperial High Commissioner, creating a propaganda film that showed him as a hero fighting against the “savages” of Africa, and dedicating a street to him in the Afrikanisches Viertel with a ceremony in 1937 that was attended by Hitler himself.

Memorial to Murdered Jews

While many colonizers in Africa were simply racist monsters, others like Gustav Nachtigal viewed themselves as the white savior that “primitive” Africans desperately needed to bring European-style order to the continent.Known as one of the great explorers of Africa, Nachtigal’s interest in ethnography and tropical medicine led him across the Sahara and through Chad where he witnessed the horrors of slavery.He led a coalition of German businessmen to establish the colony of German West Africa, the Kaiser’s first overseas territory, in 1884 in the hopes that European rule would put an end to slavery.It did not, but the German West African Company continued to reap riches from the colony’s resources until 1919.

After two bankruptcies trying to make a fortune as a trader, Adolf Lüderitz married up and wielded his newfound wealth to purchase an 84-mile stretch of land in today’s Namibia which he named “Lüderitzland” in exchange for £600 in gold and 260 rifles.With the riches from the port he established (also named Lüderitz) he eventually bought up the entire a 220,000 square mile swathe of land from South Africa to Angola. Two decades later in 1904, the indigenous people of theGerman Southwest Africa colony he founded would rise up against their overseers in the Herero Wars.

During the three years of the Herero rebellion, German colonial officials established a pattern of government-directed cruelty and violence that foreshadowed the Nazi’s treatment of Jews, leftists, gays, Sinti and Roma, and all others they despised.At the start of the war General Lothar von Trotha issued a “Vernichtungsbefehl” — an order to eliminate all indigenous people by massacring the men, and driving the women and children into the barren desert hinterlands.When the extermination order was finally lifted at the end of 1904, the survivors were herded into concentration camps or transferred to German businesses as slave labor.

In the camps survivors were forced to clean the skulls of their slaughtered people so that they could be sold to Europe for use in anthropological collections and the faux-science of phrenology.Historians estimate the death toll of this first genocide committed by the Germans in Namibia is around 80,000 Hereros (~80% of their total population) and 15,000 Nama people (~50% of their total).German colonial officers would deploy these same tactics the following year in Tanzania against the Maji-Maji Rebellion, which would leave 250,000-300,000 massacred.

Berlin’s leftist parties have been calling for street names glorifying German colonizers to be changed to reflect a more positive heritage of the area, and celebrate Africa’s biggest freedom fighters. Meanwhile, the city’s parties on the right have been engaged in a disingenuous game of rededication, not renaming. In 1986, the local council switched out who the Petersallee in the Afrikanisches Viertel honors by adding a tiny placard beneath the street sign specifying Hans Peters, a Christian Democrat politician and opposition fighter against the Nazis. Today, members of Angela Merkel’s CDU and the far-right AfD are calling for another round of rededication to dodge accusations of continuing to condone colonialism; they absurdly propose Lüderitzplatz honor Lüderitz the city in Namibia, not the man who founded that exact same city in Namibia, which the street is currently named after.

Gustav Nachtigal

Almost a decade ago, the Berlin district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg found itself in the same position after a civil society group called for the renaming of the Gröben-Ufer river bank along the Spree. Otto Friedrich von der Gröben founded and led the Brandenburg Gold Coast colony in what today would be Ghana. From 1682-1720, the Electorate of Brandenburg (later part of Prussia) got rich using this small colony as a base to sell inland Africans into the slave trade.Based on his complicity in the slave trade, the local district renamed the riverbank in 2009 after Mai Ayim — a poet, educator, and leader of the Afro-German empowerment movement. Activists in the Afrikanisches Viertel believe change is coming to their neighborhood next.

This year, the cultural committee of the local district council called for Petersallee to not just be rededicated, but to finally be renamed Maj-Maji-Allee after the genocide in Tanzania.

At the end of one of the increasingly-popular tours of the Afrikanisches Viertel, the guide closed saying that “Colonialism is a real danger to today.It’s not just about street signs from one hundred years ago. The attitude behind the signs still exists.”

Germany, ever struggling with their historical demons, has just seen two days of clashes between far-right wing protesters, neo-Nazis, counter-protesters, anti-fascists, and the police. The clashes have taken place in the town of Chemnitz, a town in Saxony in Eastern Germany. Having started after an alleged lethal stabbing by Iraqi and Syrian refugees at a popular street festival, far-right wing protesters took to the streets on Sunday.

According to the BBC, about 100 protesters initially gathered without incident, yet a short time later an additional 1,000 protesters joined their ranks in the city center. The demonstration of far-right protesters was further aided by calls from groups like Pegida, known in English as the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, while another far-right politician was quoted as saying, “If the state is no longer to protect citizens then people take to the streets and protect themselves. It’s as simple as that!”

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Protesters have been filmed giving Nazi salutes and yelling for “foreigners” to leave the country, while German police have said they are now investigating alleged assaults against an Afghan, Bulgarian, and Syrian due to the protests. Yet as the night wore on and the ranks of protesters grew, so did the ranks of the counter-protesters and anti-fascists, who have also massed in the city chanting “refugees welcome.”

Monday was the second night of clashes which left several people wounded as police attempt to contain the situation. The New York Times just reported that after a break in the clashes mid-day on Monday, they resumed towards the evening with thousands of protesters marching with German flags “Chemnitz is ours — foreigners out.” They were also joined by groups of neo-Nazis, who eventually broke through the police barricades. Usage of projectiles: bottles, fireworks, and other items have been reportedly used by both protesters and counter-protesters.

The spokesman for the Prime Minister, Angela Merkel, told journalists. “We don’t tolerate such unlawful assemblies and the hounding of people who look different or have different origins and attempts to spread hatred on the streets.”

Just a couple years ago, most Americans assumed that Nazis had been firmly relegated to the past, never to reappear outside the confines of history books. When Nazis did preoccupy the American mind they kindly restricted themselves to playing the role of evil villains in video games or on the silver screen. Unlike the fictitious Nazis of our entertainment media whose escapades always ended in defeat, the explosion of neo-Nazis after the electoral victory of Donald Trump mainstreamed the alt-right two years ago presents the first real chance for the vast majority of Americans to confront a Nazi in person. After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last summer ended with a white supremacist murdering a peaceful protester, the question of how to deal with Nazis has rebounded back to relevance for the first time in over seven decades.

The far-right loves to provoke. They live off of alarming and outraging headlines that win them the publicity they use to fundraise and recruit. Anyone who has ever listened to American intelligence officials talk about Al-Qaeda or Islamic State will recognize this is the go-to strategy of any extremist group. Most far-right provocations in America take place online through racist, neo-Confederate, and anti-semitic Facebook groups or Twitter rants. However, these movements of hate also frequently spill over into the real world. A prime example of such childish provocation came last September when a neo-Nazi walked around downtown Seattle in a leather jacket and a swastika armband “spewing racist vitriol” and hoping to get a reaction. By the time police arrived, the neo-Nazi had been punched to the ground and America was once again convulsed with the debate of whether one should or should not punch Nazis.

Germans have been grappling with their own far-right populist insurgency ever since the AFD, short for die Alternative für Deutschland / “the Alternative for Germany,” metastasized from an austerity-minded, anti-Euro movement to a party of xenophobic, homophobic, and pro-Putin trolls. Since the 2015 wave of refugees who fled Syria’s civil war and sought asylum in Europe, the normally bland world of German politics has been set ablaze by questions of how to differentiate between economic immigrants and fleeing refugees, whether Islam has a place in German society, and how a country that has spent the last 70 years atoning for Nazism should handle the resurgence of a far-right political party.

The people of Berlin have the answer.

Seeking to show off its newfound power after becoming the main opposition party in Germany’s Bundestag, or parliament, in 2017, the AFD declared it would host a march on the capital and invited its supporters to flood Berlin on May 27. In response 70 of Berlin’s most beloved clubs decided to close their doors in May that day and instead throw a party to celebrate everything they love about Berlin and Germany. “We’re everything the Nazis aren’t: We’re progressive, queer, feminist, anti-racist, inclusive, colorful, and we have unicorns,” stated the clubs as they called on their fans to join them in a day of peaceful protest through partying. Under the motto “No Dancefloor for Nazis: Let’s Blow the AFD Away with our Bass,” Berlin’s response to the far-right was born.

The AFD wanted their march to send a message to Angela Merkel and to set the tone in the capital in time for the beginning of the 2018 German legislative session. Through its calls to action on social media, the AFD claims it was able to rally 8,000 supporters to the march—less than 0.01 percent of the German population. Any American, however, is well-aware that the far-right likes to overstate their crowd sizes. Indeed, Berlin state police who closely monitored the event revealed that only 5,000 people were in attendance.

Poster for anti-fascist party

On the same day, the clubs’ Fest der Offenheit, or “Party of Openness,” sprawled across central Berlin from the Brandenburg Gate to the Victory Column in the middle of Tiergarten park. The clubs even organized a parade that featured 32 colorfully decorated floats, all blasting loud techno, house, or trance beats. In total, roughly 70,000 people turned out on Berlin’s streets to dance for hours, covered in glitter, and to show the AFD where they belong: on the sidelines of German politics.

Following their monumental embarrassment, the AFD then turned to another one of the far-right’s favorite tricks: playing the victim. They complained their “Meinungsfreiheit”—the German right to an opinion—and their right to protest had been infringed upon by the clubbers. Supporters of an open, welcoming Germany retorted that“Hate was never an opinion, hate isn’t an opinion, and hate will never be an opinion because hate isn’t reflective or constructive the way opinions are.” The partiers never intruded upon the AFD march; they simply disrupted it with their loud bass beats and stole the headlines.

Berliners are renown for their “Schnauze”—the gruff, charming, and humorful way in which residents of the capital approach life and each other. It’s no wonder Berliners would choose to take down the far-right with their unique combination of confidence and wit. Last month while the leader of the AFD was swimming at a local lake, a Berliner stole his clothes and ran away crying, “No swimming fun for Nazis!” While we in America argue over whether it’s OK to punch Nazis, Berliners will continue to show us the way by partying, making jokes, and exposing the far-right as the ludicrous movement it is.